Iíll admit I am not an avid or experienced gardener like Diana, but I still find myself telling my new seedlings how happy I am with them and giving them encouragement. I sometimes also curse the weeds, but not with the same intensity.

Mythbusters Proves Talking Helps (kind of)

Mythbusters exposed seven small greenhouses to various conditions. Two were exposed to negative speech, two to positive speech, a fifth with classical music and a sixth with intense death metal music. A seventh greenhouse, used as a control sample, had no stereo. (Speech and music were supplied by recorders). You can see videos and details here: “Talking to Plants” Proven to Work

Surprising Results:

The greenhouses with the recordings of speech grew better than the control.

There was no difference between the kind or angry talk.

Classical music plants grew better than controls.

Intense death metal plants grew best of all!

A Month-Long Royal Horticultural Society Study also discovered that:

Talking to your plants really can help them grow faster (compared to controls).

Plants grow faster to the sound of a female voice than to a male voice.

Plants grew best to the voice of Sarah Darwin, granddaughter of legendary botanist Charles Darwin, reading a passage from On the Origin of Species.

Neither of these studies were large scale or double-blind. The Mythbusters results were perhaps influenced by the fact that the plants were exposed to recorded voice and sound rather than real humans who were feeling and looking at the plants.

Plants Feel Emotions Too

The fact that the study did not have live humans is important, according to Cleve Backster, famous for his experiments revealed in the book The Secret Life of Plants.

Cleve found that polygraph readings detected emotion in plants just as they do in humans. Cleve Baxter knows this field as well as anyone. He founded the CIAís polygraph unit shortly after WWII and founded The Baxter School of Lie Detection, which is the longest running polygraph school in the world. However, Mythbusters did a separate test of Baxter’s theory and could not repeat his findings.

Some research seems to indicate that certain frequencies activate certain genes in plants. Other researchers claim plants can read our minds or at least react to our thoughts.

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Diana Herrington turned a debilitating health crisis into a passion for helping others with healthy, sugar-free, gluten-free, eating and cooking. After testing and researching every possible healthy therapy on her delicate system she has developed simple, powerful principles which she shares in her recent book Eating Green and Lean, and as host to Care2 groups: Healthy Living Network and Healthy Cooking. She is the head chef at Real Food for Life, where she shares recipes and tips. Sign up for the Real Food for Life weekly newsletter or catch her on Facebook or Twitter (@DancinginLife).

I read that Indians in Canada/America used to apologize to plants, such as trees, which they cut down and say thank you.
I buy my vegetables, but I follow the Indians' example and remember to give a thought to and thank them for giving me nourishment.

I rarely talk to plants, but thanks to this article I will be more so. I look forward to my vegie and flower garden growing better now. I was told years ago that plants respond to you talking to them. I wonder what a tree feels like when it's cut down.

As someone once said "Vegetarians must really, really hate plants!"
Everything we eat is or has been alive. So, actually, eating a purely meat diet would be less unkind.
I talk to my plants sometimes. Often, when a plant hasn't been doing too well I tell it I'm going to pull it up. Amazingly (or not?) it suddenly decides it want to grow again.

Fascinating and intriguing. Plants are always a tranquil part of Nature, love to be in the presence of ferns in a forest as their leaves lightly dance in a light breeze.

Meat eaters are often admonished for our diet (mine being organically raised) but those eating only veggies and fruit seem to believe their diet is superior because in their view plants feel no pain when taken from the ground to be consumed. Who really knows?

Plants are likely far more complex than we know and often people can only empathize with life forms closest to ourselves.

Death metal plant growth? Fascinating, wonder what they think of jack hammers and construction sounds? Chalk on a black board?

Do we hear plants talk? The carrots were blaming the lettuce for something as I walked by but carrots are so very prone to gossip given all the stress of the rabbits hopping in the garden trying to eat them,

I have always had an affinity for plants over all other things. Talking to plants is beneficial not to mention that they access all the excess carbon we exhale and create oxygen for us. No plants = no us.